Measuring Success
For much of our lives, we are at the mercy of external systems that provide us with measurements of our success. Growing up, we lived by the school calendar and saw success on the report card distributed every quarter. The sports we were involved in dictated our evenings and weekends, and success was achieved by being handed medals or trophies at the end of the tournament. When we moved on to our adult job we transitioned to scheduled reviews with our bosses and found rewards in the bi-weekly paycheck schedule and yearly bonuses.
I never realized how much these systems influenced me and just how many of them there are, until I transitioned into primarily being a stay-at-home parent and many of these systems became nonexistent. I don’t get paid, I don’t have anyone providing me reviews of how I’m doing (other than my toddler, I suppose, but that’s a dangerous route to lean on the irrationality, unpredictability, and “id” driven behaviors of toddlerhood to measure my success), and we don’t currently have any schedule binding obligation that we are a part of. So, each day I begin and end with no set schedule and no measurements for whether I’m succeeding or not.
And so I have found myself on a journey for the past three years, working to deconstruct the deeply embedded measurements of success that I didn’t realize I had heavily relied on for much of my life. And while many of you may not find yourself in parenthood or as a stay-at-home parent, I still think it’s a worthy concept to sit with.
What and who contributes to your feelings of success? Is it an external system? If so, are you okay with that? It’s okay if the answer is yes. As much as I enjoy being a stay-at-home parent, I also enjoy that I still work part-time as a therapist. It feels nice to have a space where there are clearer measurements for success, especially in comparison to the lack of them I experience in parenting.
But, if the answer is no, can you identify things you can do about it? Maybe you still need to stay at the job that is dictating much of your success, but you can start to do some work to distance the reviews you are given from your boss and your overall identity. Your boss may say areas are lacking in your work production, but can you separate that from your identity as a whole and know that you are not lacking as a human? Or can you know that friends of yours may make more on their bi-weekly paychecks than you do, but that doesn’t mean you are less than them?
It can be an unsettling concept to sit with, to realize just how much of our identity, not just our measurements of success, are dictated by external systems. But, we can’t deal with and change things we haven’t named. So, as unsettling as it may initially feel, I encourage you to stick with the discomfort and wrestle with what contributes to your measurements of success and see if there are shifts you need to make.
